It’s the Charge of the Light Brigade, Custer’s Last Stand, Pickett’s Charge. GOP culture warriors are bravely raising the flag of religious freedom (you may stop snickering now) while they rush up the hill to storm the barricades of Evil Contraception. They place in front of the American people a literal picture of grim men sitting in judgment over women’s health and sexuality, while poll after poll shows most Americans supporting contraception and yearning instead for leadership on the economy.
It seems like head-scratching political incompetence, doesn’t it? I could be rich if I got a nickel every time someone said What Were They Thinking?
Actually, they’re not thinking. They are moving as a herd, over a cliff.
It’s hardly gone unnoticed on this site that the level of wingnuttery in the Republican Party has been soaring faster than Jeremy Lin’s jump shots. Damn, I wish I could purchase futures in GOP wingnuttery.
Republicans have gotten tons of mileage out of the culture wars. But this Prius of a wedge issue has become a Hummer. Republicans keep driving the thing, trying to mow down the occasional woman or gay crossing the street, but they don’t get very far before they have to fill up again on campaign contributions and wingnut outrage. Meanwhile the independent voters are gushing away. Don’t they get it? Aren’t they supposed to be the savvy politicians?
This is commonly attributed to the masks coming off, showing who these people really are. And while the masks are indeed coming off, I want to know why, and I think I do:
They can’t help themselves.
Let me say it again: they can’t help themselves.
The reason is that the Republican base and the politicians most closely aligned with that base have been actively casting off their connections to the rest of the world. This group, whose grasp of reality has become increasingly tenuous, is drawing itself in an ever-tighter circle.
To a certain extent it’s a matter of ignorance. They don’t believe things they hear that are inconsistent with their world view, and they tend to get their news chiefly from institutions that share this view (a phenomenon that applies to many of us as well, but our institutions are much more reality-based). But there’s something else going on, something both sad and disturbing.
Put starkly, the Republican Party has become a cult. It’s a large cult, and authoritarian though it is, this cult is not dominated by a single leader. In fact, particularly relevant to this discussion, the various components of this cult are interacting with one another, each one egging another on to higher and higher degrees of purity, more distilled expressions of bigotry, and more drastic and draconian measures.
These values – purity, bigotry, and the need to take drastic action – override all other considerations. Practicality, compassion, even electability are no match. So state legislatures push out the immigrant workers necessary for the state’s agricultural economy, presidential candidates take ever harsher stands, knowing that they will have to defend those stands in the general election, Congressmen hold kangaroo courts, and pundits decry vast media conspiracies. Their fellow cult members lap it up and yammer for more, which makes the actors feel all the more righteous and determined.
While this internal ferment brings approbation to individual actors (the condemnation of outsiders is not a negative, but rather a battle scar to be proudly displayed), the result is to move the party closer to the cliff. Like the lemmings of popular legend they push one another over the edge, scurrying madly all the time.
At some point the system will revert to something more typical, and GOP politicians will rediscover how to hide their hate, bide their time, and subvert more effectively. But for now, a social phenomenon both horrific and fascinating is playing out before our eyes.